


A Wire Crown

by theeventualwinner



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angband, Blood, Gen, Gore, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-13
Updated: 2015-06-13
Packaged: 2018-04-04 04:35:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4125663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theeventualwinner/pseuds/theeventualwinner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rog labours as a captive amid Angband's furnaces, and upon a time a chance meeting occurs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Wire Crown

The air amid the blast furnaces was stifling; every grinding shovel of coal or pump of the bellows belched forth nothing but burning cinders and scorching air. The crunch of spades into the coal-heaps was limned in the clink of chains, by the whistling crack of an overseer’s whip and scattered yelps of pain. Long the slaves had laboured in the darkness, and about the circumference of the immense subterranean chamber that housed the furnaces they were dotted at their stations. In pairs they laboured at the mouths of those infernal machines; fettered loosely at the ankles and wrists that might permit some servile mobility, and then each tethered again to his partner by a long chain at their feet that passed through a bolt riveted to the floor. 

Manacles chafed upon Rog’s wrists as he drove his spade deep into the stacked coal before him, and as with a grunt of effort he levered a hefty load into the gaping maw of the furnace nearby, his partner did the same in turn. The fires of Angband never slept, they only glowered in their wrath and demanded brute labour to feed them, and as a gust of boiling air enveloped him Rog twisted to wipe the sweat from his brow against the filthy shoulder of his tunic. The side of his throat dug painfully into the blunted edge of the collar that was clasped about his neck, and swiftly he righted himself as a hulking uruk stalked over to where he and his partner were tethered. His scarred shoulders heaved as he drove his spade forward, his wrists ached as the strain jarred through them, yet dutifully he laboured as the snarling uruk and the menace of the metal-strung whip in its clawed hand passed him by. 

Sometimes it was easier not to fight, he had persuaded himself long ago, and though every shred of pride within him scorned him for the shameful thought, its perverse logic was undeniable. If it meant sparing his back from the whip, or from reprisals yet fouler then sometimes it was better to just obey, to  _endure_ , to make himself passive and pretend at docility until the time for action should come. Yet he would not forsake the deep counsels of his heart; his dignity was not yet stripped from him, his hatred yet ran fierce, and though chains trammelled him, he had not resigned himself to them. Hatefully then he glanced to the retreating uruk, and he snatched a bold moment of reprieve from his labour. 

Heavily he leaned upon the notched handle of his spade, and though his gaze wandered cautiously about the cavern, it came to rest eventually upon the elf that laboured beside him, another grim spectre in this place of suffering.

Arms corded with scars drove the edge of a spade clean through a massive hunk of coal; three scabbed wounds ripped across the elf’s freckled cheek, yet such callous injuries were not what held Rog’s curiosity. For, he noticed as wearily he hefted his spade once more, across the elf’s sweaty brow was bound a cruel circlet of wire, thick and barbed and twisted across his head like some obscene mockery of a crown. Its blades stabbed into the elf’s skin, blood beaded beneath lank strands of cropped russet hair, yet silently the elf bore his torment, and sickly dismay turned in Rog’s stomach. But hurriedly he turned aside as a monstrous bellow echoed through the chamber, and as he returned to his labour he sought to think no more of his partner. 

It was easier that way, he told himself, it was cleaner, it was  _safer_ ; and for miserable hours they toiled in silence beneath the whips of their masters. 

A dark-throated horn blared throughout the cavern, and with a sigh of relief Rog at last laid down his spade. Wearily he slumped to the floor, and beside him the wire-crowned elf did also, and sat in grim silence they awaited their captors.

Dark were Rog’s thoughts when at last they appeared. A plate of bland gruel mixed with mushrooms and some shredded, dried meat was thrust into his hands by a squinting orc, and a bowl of greasy water slopped to the stones beside him by an uruk. Meagre fare, and monotonous, Rog thought it, but it kept him in flesh for labour, and mechanically he began to eat, spooning the gruel into his mouth with his fingers. He paid the orcs little heed as they moved aside, he concerned himself far more with chewing through a lump of lukewarm gristle amid the shredded meat, until suddenly the uruk lunged forwards. An iron-shod boot smashed into his partner’s ribs; the impact of it was hard enough to jerk upon the slack chain that fettered their legs together, and a spike of nervous adrenaline skewered through Rog’s stomach as furtively he looked over. 

“No!” the uruk snarled; a monstrous smile twisted its face as the elf cringed and spluttered below it, and the orc looked to it in confusion, the plate of gruel wavering in its hand. 

“Not this one,” the uruk sneered, and an awful light shone in its piggish eyes as it grasped the elf by the collar and hauled him upwards. “Orders from above, y’hear,” it spat; and the elf whimpered as possessively, almost  _delicately_  the uruk’s fingers stroked over the tortured skin of his cheek. “Someone wants their slut to go hungry.” 

Ugly laughter clotted in the air, and roughly the uruk relinquished the elf, who curled back against the coal-heap as far as his fetters would allow. A plaintive moan bled out of his throat, and was met with nothing but a disdainful gobbet of saliva spat into the bowl of water that clattered to the stones by his feet. Iron boots tramped off, yet even as the orcs passed beyond sight about the curved belly of a huge kiln, the elf sat motionless, and Rog looked on appalled. 

Violence he had seen, he had felt; base injury was as commonplace as the rats that scurried through the slave-pens by the shade of night but  _that_ … The way the uruk had talked, the way it had touched that elf, the cruelty in it, the  _tenderness_  in it; that was something different, something  _perverse_ , and disquiet squirmed through Rog’s innards to think of it. It was stupid, he thought, it was reckless, it was  _weak_ , and in a place where weakness spelled only pain it was dangerous, but as the silence became suffocating at last Rog turned to the elf still curled into the coal-heap. 

 _Someone wants their slut to go hungry_.

The words chimed with all of their creeping horror through Rog’s mind, and led by some dreadful, clamouring impulse that he did not dare give name to, he pushed his half-finished plate of gruel towards the other elf. 

“Here,” Rog whispered, in the corrupt Oromëan that was standard of the slave pens. “Eat.” 

The elf barely acknowledged that he had spoken; he flinched, yet he stared dully off into the shadows, and a sudden twist of frustration cramped through Rog’s innards. If he was caught, if the orcs  _came back_ … Acts of insurrection were punished without mercy, he had long since learned. He doubted that the mess of flayed, scarred skin across his ribs would ever fade, and with the passing of time and the tender healing of ruined flesh, he was never quite sure if such a fleeting victory was worth the weight of his suffering. Yet hard he smashed aside such thoughts, and he looked sharply to the elf once more. 

“Quickly!” he urged. “Take it!”

“ _I can’t_ …” The elf’s voice was scarcely a whisper; a ruined, lifeless thing. It stopped the breath clean in Rog’s lungs. “He’ll know…” The elf’s lips quirked painfully, scabbed flesh cracked across his cheek and oozed a watery mess of blood down his cheek. “ _He always knows…_ ”

A wince curled over Rog’s face, and slowly he nodded, and reluctantly he retracted the offer of food. The elf started violently as Rog’s grimy hand slid across the space between them, the startled jerk of chains chattered like failing little stars amid the gloom, and a perilous spear of sympathy drove through Rog’s heart.

“I have not seen you before,” Rog said softly, as if talking to a frightened child, and warily the other elf looked to him. “What is your name?”

“ _I don’t have a name_.” The words crawled like dead things over the elf’s lips, and a shiver of horror passed through Rog’s heart. “ _They took it away…”_

“It’s alright,” he said kindly, beseechingly; he clung to his gentleness like a shield to mask the  _disgust_  that came crawling up his throat. “I… I am a friend, I promise. My name is Rog, and you need not be afraid, not of me.”  

The elf’s lips quivered, and slowly his chin crinkled, but silently he shook his head. A dreadful light shivered in his eyes, that abhorrent crown upon his head stung and bled like a damning mark of his sin, and Rog stared pityingly at him. 

“Why have they done this to you?” he murmured, but the elf’s eyes jumped to him as if he had branded the words into him. 

“I d-didn’t do it…” the elf whispered, such hysteria seemed for a moment to grip him that consequences or no Rog would have reached for him if his fetters had allowed it, he would have held him just to ease the distress that blazed in his eyes. “I…  _I didn’t_ …”

“Where are your family, my friend?” Rog said quickly, and a tender smile illumined his face as the rhythm of the words flowed through him, and his own answer chimed within his head in reply. It was a mantra, almost holy, in the reeking darkness of the pits the slaves whispered it to each other: they told where they were going when the chance was seized, of who they were going back to, of why they still endured. “Have you sisters, or brothers, a mother and father to welcome you home when this evil has passed?” 

The elf’s eyes were nothing but smudges of pain, and his voice near clove Rog’s chest in two. 

 _“… I don’t remember anymore…”_  

A long silence reigned, and Rog simply sat there, aching and impotent, until with shaking fingers the elf reached for his bowl of water and drained it in three long gulps. Mastering himself Rog did likewise; the soured liquid coated his tongue in an acrid sheen, but through it he drew breath to speak again. But before he could utter more than a syllable, the blare of a horn sounded through the cavern, and as one he and the other elf scrambled to their feet and grasped their tools once more. And whatever Rog was about to say was lost to the grind of coal and the flare of the furnaces as their labours drove unceasingly onwards. 

But in the years that came after Rog thought of him, the elf with the haunted eyes and the wire crown. He thought of the terror that had seized him as the orcs came at the day’s end, of the all too vicious glee with which they hauled him off to some evil fate. Clawed hands lingered just a little too long over his buttocks, over his thighs; their leers were just a little too broad; the elf’s fretful struggles were severed with a clout across the face that ripped his cheek open anew and sent blood spattering to the stones below. 

Numbly at last the elf was led off, and guilt gnawed at Rog’s heart. He should have done something; the feeling, the  _accusation_  scratched under his skin, though fettered and bound just as tightly as the other elf,  _he should have done_   _something_. The way they touched him was abhorrent, it was  _sick_ , it was somehow so much worse than simple violence, and black anger churned in Rog’s heart as the degradation of the orcs’ actions sunk in just a little bit deeper. 

He should have done something, some rash, futile thing, and though in truth it likely would have been fruitless, it would have heaped only pain upon himself, in those awful moments it did not matter. The hopelessness in the elf’s eyes tore at him deeper than the lash of a whip ever could; the pitiful, terrified little whimper that echoed in the elf’s throat as the orcs dragged him away played over and over again in his ears like some sordid litany of anguish.

It seemed to scour through his veins, it brimmed in his blood and wrenched up only hatred, only loathing, yet such emotions ran hollow within him. They crowned him only in his disgrace. For though he would have failed, at least he should have tried.  _He should have done something_ , anything more than just silently sitting there, passively watching and letting such humiliations be inflicted.

For though his hands had clenched into bloodless fists at his sides he had forced himself to be still, though fury had roared in his heart he had quashed it, he had banished it, and the shame of his  _inactions_  devoured him.

The desperate, choking whimpers of his kinsman rang still in his ears, and Rog thought only of how he had looked away.


End file.
